Have you ever wondered if you’re getting the most out of your knowledge workers? Worried about slackers just reading their screen instead of typing? Have you ever wondered who was the brightest bulb in your boiler room? Well, now you can see the answer with this device from Brando.com.hk:



The faster one types, the brighter the light glows…

Tip ‘o the hat to: Hacked Gadgets

We’ve done a prior entry on StormWatch talking about their roof system. Now, Meredith and company have released a storm shutter system. We don’t worry about hurricanes much in the San Francisco area, but if you’re on the Gulf Coast, you sure do. There are many advantages to the StormWatch approach but chief among them is visibility. Take a look at the glass doors in the image below with the shutters deployed.



If you live in a hurricane zone, check out StormWatch’s products. They could save you a bundle this hurricane season.

The energy content normally posted on this site has a new home at Montara Energy Ventures. As a community service, I will periodically publish a digest that summarizes the content posted on the MeV site. You can easily subscribe to content on the MeV site as well as the content from this site, Musings from the Coast.

• How much does geothermal development cost?
• Sierra Geothermal reports preliminary drilling results
• Aluminum + Gallium + Water = Hydrogen, Alumina, and Gallium
• Mobilizing the median
• Renewable power PPA’s often fail
• Change can be tough
• Rizhao: City of Sunshine
• Our newsletter
• Solar PV costs predicted to fall 40% by 2010
• Ormat inks PPA with Sierra Pacific
• Great Green Car Review
• CFL downside
• Calpine to add 80MW to Geysers
• Windhunter
• Magenn’s floating turbine
• Calpine announces Geysers Repowering

If you’re interested in topics like these, make sure you subscribe to the Renewable Energy Journal, it’s free.

Things tend to appear in clumps and for whatever reason, this week it’s interesting Linux based appliances. A colleague forwarded along information on this interesting device, the Pico Pro, from Yoggie Security Solutions yesterday. Effectively, this is a USB device with an onboard processor in addition to the expected storage that acts as a personal security device. The images below show the internals of the device:



This device has many different security applications working in concert to protect your computer: firewall, vpn, network address translation, intrusion prevention and detection, proxies (ftp, http, smtp, and pop), anti-* (spam, spyware, and phishing), URL CAT, and coordinating frameworks for the software. It’s effectively a Linux-based security appliance on a USB fob. Pretty cool.

While I understand that Yoggie was trying for a specific look and form factor, I do take issue with the fact that the device is invasive as it replaces low-level communications drivers in the operating system with Yoggie drivers that divert traffic to the device. Subsequently, the device only functions with Windows devices at this time. I would have much preferred an inline device that creates a private network with no invasive software meaning it’s cross platform to start. In fairness, it looks like Yoggie has a SOHO device that does such a thing.

You might expect these things to cost an arm and a leg, but they start quite reasonably priced at $179.

Have you ever wanted to take advantage of not just a single open wifi point, but up to 6 of them in a single location and bond them into a single, high speed pipe? If so, Slurpr is the answer to your dreams. Take a look at a picture of the appliance below:

Hats off the the folks at GeekTechnique for pulling this great little appliance together. Legal issues aside, this presents an interesting set of opportunities to harvest and use wifi for high bandwidth operations.